Upgraded to HTMLDB 2.0

Upgraded from 1.6. I’ve already done some playing on 2.0 on htmldb.oracle.com, already liked the little interface and management improvements.

I’m not too interested in all the bells and whistles – I just want to see first if I can produce usable maintenance forms for my preferred flavour of tables. I’ve been using the wizards to create all my pages, but have come across problems whenever the tables use natural PKs (specifically, when I try to make master-detail pages) – so far most problems have been resolved by adding a PK populated by a sequence from a trigger. Not what I really want to do; I’m hoping that I can find a way to get HTMLDB to work with natural-pk tables.

The main disadvantage to using surrogate keys I’ve found is practical – apart from the obvious one that I have to ensure that a unique constraint is on the natural key (just have to be careful to do it) – but then these surrogate keys get propogated throughout my design (especially when I have modelled multiple inheritance with table-per-subclass, which is my personal preference) and writing queries and certain types of constraints can become tricky.

So far my impression of HTMLDB is that it is a nice simple product – but hopefully not so simplistic as that it requires surrogate keys everywhere?

Another problem that I’ll investigate is HTMLDB’s behaviour in regards to checking for record changes prior to updates; I’ve gotten the “can’t update because the hash values differ” error quite often when I’ve based a page on an updateable view. I use updateable views a lot as a way of hiding the database complexity from the application, and I don’t want to have to (a) denormalise my design just to suit HTMLDB, or (b) try to design HTMLDB to work with each entity separately.